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Today BGB 1.4 by beware was released. BGB is a Gameboy emulator and debugger. BGB 1.3, released little over a year ago focused mostly on emulation accuracy. It was the first update to BGB for 5 years and brought BGB past KiGB (which is actually a “compatible” emulator rather than a terribly accurate one, despite bold claims.) and up to par with Gambatte.

My personal interest in BGB is mostly the debugger. My choice, before BGB 1.4 existed, was between no$gmb, which had the better debugger, and BGB which had the better emulation. After a lot of persuasion, I managed to get beware to implement a number of debugging features, some of which existed in no$gmb and some of which were new requests. The big new debugger features are support for debug symbols and an “online” assembler which allows you to immediately start typing instructions or data to be assembled to the cursor position. Plus a big number of bug fixes, small improvements and optimizations in all areas of the program.

One noteworthy feature (which I’m not personally is not very interested in) is improved link port emulation for games. In particular, pawkemanz linking now works reliably, as do Tetris and LSDj.

And lastly, an invitation to anybody interested in Gameboy development: please join the IRC channel #gbdev on EFNet.